Which platform for the executive coach?
Helping you hire the right coach for your managers
Executive coaches are external people (usually consultants) hired to spend time one on one with managers to help them develop stronger managerial or self management skills. Executive coaches are a lot more common now than when we first started to offer this service.

The benefits of this form of skills development can be considerable:
- individualised learning sessions to concentrate that most scarce
  resource, time, on what really matters
- the opportunity to address real-life problems in real time and learn 
  from the experience
- a level of frankness and disclosure that is rarely possible in the 
  more public setting of a training course

But coaches can be expensive, so there are some things that you need to check out. The first consideration is why executive coaching is needed rather than, say, a training course or individual coaching by the person’s manager?

Next, turn the attention to assessing the prospective coach:
- Does the coach have excellent interpersonal skills and a thorough
  grasp of adult learning principles?
- Do they understand the principles, processes and strategies of your
  organisation?
- Do they also have practical managerial experience to back up any
  theory?
- Do they have sufficient self-awareness to know their own strengths
  and limitations?
- Finally, do they have a method or framework for their coaching?

Methods vary from coach to coach. The Cadence approach is as follows:
-  The first task is to establish some goals with the manager being 
   coached and to establish trust / rapport between coach and manager. 
- Then we can proceed to the issues. The sessions are driven by the
   issues that the manager (or his/her manager) deems to be important,
   rather than following a set programme laid down by the coach.

A typical session may involve:

1.	Description of an issue that the manager wants help with and what has been tried so far, followed by
2.	Some input from the coach of concepts or skills coaching, perhaps followed by rehearsal and ending with
3.	Action planning
4.	The next session begins with a review of what was tried, the consequences and any fine tuning needed.